 everybody. Okay. All right. Let's open the meeting. It is 633. Do we have any additions? Do we have any, Bruce? I don't have your memo. Don't have my memo. What's the point of coming to the meeting? Exactly. Okay, I can. Kim says the printer won't work. And if you want me to leave, if I can. I have other things I can do. Okay. Okay, so we don't have any additions. Review of minutes 321-22. Has anyone read the minutes? I moved to approve them as written. I'm sorry. I had either a question or a request. And now I can't find what I said. It's in the discussion of, excuse me, sorry. When we're talking, the conversation with Vermont State Police, I'm wondering if we can add in there, just because it was something that said that they encouraged people who want to contact or want to notify the police to notify them directly and not rely on social media to get that information to the police and not to use the emergency number when they do that. I just thought that was new information to me when I heard it from them. Really? I thought that was helpful. Does that make sense? So it's actually on the website, it has been on their website. No, on our website. Okay. It lists the two numbers and says the reason for contacting both. But I wouldn't rely on the minutes for providing information to people. Okay. Something else is the State Community Advisory Board report. The blah, blah, blah. It's towards the middle of the paragraph. The vast array of direct communication options coupled with the speed of interaction appears to have negated. I don't know that this is what Don said. I think he said that he was wondering whether it did, and he was looking to us to kind of give him input. So I wouldn't, perhaps, or my recollection is that the vast array of direct communications options coupled with the speed of interactions may have negated the need for, or may negate the need for and value of intermediary contact organization that's one suggestion. And the other is board members encourage the CIV to continue its current activities and look for ways to expand maybe its contact with the community, perhaps conducting outreach to improve its visibility and connections to younger communities, and racial justice organizations. With that, lovely. Thank you. Wonderful minutes. Okay. So we did have a motion to approve the minutes, didn't we? From Amy. And okay, do we have a second? With those amendments, second. Okay, Judith, second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes appear to have it. They do have it. Now we have the minutes from 328. What does everyone think about those minutes? I haven't been able to print them off, so I couldn't read them. My printer is not thinking with this computer for some reason. So no one's read the minutes. I would move to adopt the minutes. I'll second it. Judith made the motion. And John made the second. Is there any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, the ayes appear to have it. They do have it. The next item, public comment. And I see some names here. Are they public? Brian Voight? Is he public? No, I'm actually here with the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, Brian. So no public comment. Let's move to B. B is Vermont B trans paving grant application. And the first bullet is the required complete street determination. I remember Carl, you've commented on this in the past. Yeah. And we decided that it's the game's not worth the candle. County Road to try to expand it to provide complete street facilities. And we have standard language about that. We've passed the number of times. Yep. And we need to approve the application. Is that something you are going to sign, Bruce? Actually, we don't. All we do is submit. Oh, okay. On the two side. Okay. You need the motion on the complete streets. Okay. So we need two motions. First of all, on the complete streets. You want to make that motion, Carl? Sir. Ruth, you know the standard language? Yes. You want to read it? Sure. The slide board finds that it has considered complete streets for this area and the cost of incorporating complete streets principles is disproportionate to probable use due to natural resource constraints imposed by long stretches of lead to near the road. Thank you. Thank you. So Carl made the motion. You have a second in. Okay, Judith, you made the second. Great. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes appear to have if they do have it. Now we need to approve. We need a motion to approve the application. And just so you understand what we're doing here, this is actually the first time we've applied for this to District 6. We're now officially in District 6 for all purposes, except remnant uses. So this one will be our first try back in District 6. Okay. Just for point of clarification, we have a grant for the county road. This is a separate grant. This is for the middle two miles. We have a grant for the lower two miles. Yep. So this is a new grant application. We've actually, this is our third try. Okay. But the other two were with District 7. Okay. I make a motion that we approve the FY 23 municipal highway, excuse me, the Vermont agency of transportation municipal highway grant application for the middle two miles of county road for East Montpelier. For the amount, what's the amount? $515,209.50. So moved. Right. Yep. That's the cost of the project. The grant is $200,000. Yeah. Project five something. Okay. We have a second. Yeah. Okay. We have a second. Amy second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes appear to have if they do have it. Okay. C is update on county road paving and covert replacement project. Bruce, can you bring us up to speed on that? Do you have any of these documents? Just for fun. I don't have any documents. I just have, I scribbled off the agenda in desperation because the printer wasn't working. So, but I understood from something that you sent out that costs have gone up dramatically. So what we've got is essentially four grants and operation here and three projects. The net effect is the cost is about 1.3 million compared to 1.1 million last year, 1.36 million compared to 1.1 last year. So we're up 260,000. And if we don't get any of these additional grants or or amendments, which we've also requested, it comes out of capital reserve. We've got it. It's just we didn't want to put that much into this project. Right. And so how much are we going to have to spend out of our own money for this project? I mean, if we have already two grants for the covert replacements, do we not? Or just one? Three grants for the covert replacements and then one for the paving. The total of the grants is 383 in change and the total out of pocket is 980. Give it a million bucks. Yeah. Holy shit. That's what it costs right now for paving. It's a million dollars for four miles, about 250,000 a mile. It's crazy. But it isn't just the paving. It's a bullmagn too. Well, yes, but that only costs a certain amount. The paving itself is the real cost. All right. How much is it? Reflaming. You probably cut out 40,000 a mile. So in how many miles is it? Four four. So you cut out 160 if you didn't bullmagn the whole thing. You cut out 160, but we've got the grant for the first two miles for bullmagn. Yep. Wow. Yeah. That is nuts. So we have applied to district seven because they hold these grants for amendments to the grants, whether we get any of them. Who knows? Wow. Why don't we consider approving it and if we don't get the grant awards, pending the grant awards, approval of the grant awards? Well, if not, we're not to approve at this point. We're not. We're not approving anything. Yeah. I mean, if you cancel the projects, you cancel the projects. I wouldn't suggest it. But if you do, that's your choice. No, I wouldn't. Contractors are going to start probably the day after July 4th. And hopefully we'll be done by early August. Well, let's hope we get some money. And I mean, we have the ARPA money that we have to talk about. But we'll see. Yeah, that wouldn't be for this project, though. Okay. You won't have cleared it through all the processes. Wow. You have about two million in capital reserves. So you have the funds. That's not the problem. It's just, this is a little more than we're meant to spend on this. It's called Sticker Shock. Plus, I hate to put all the money into that project. We have other paving that's coming up. I've noticed. All right. You have other paving, but this is your biggest paving. No, I understood. But I was looking at Cherry Tree Hill pavement last time I was in Vermont, and that's definitely starting to deteriorate. That's one of the first roads that we did when I got on the slack board was Cherry Tree Hill. You didn't do Cherry Tree Hill. You must be talking about Town Hill. Town Hill, yeah. Yeah. No, Town Hill will be your next one up because the waving course is completely gone on a good share of it. I know. What's the thought of the pavement there that goes for, what, two tenths of a mile or so? Oh, that apron? We've never repaved it. It's a little bit more than an apron. Yeah, we never repaved it. That was done by the state when they moved it. So anyway, Town Hill is starting to look like it's going to need it. But when was the last time we did this stretch at County Road? Not that long though, unfortunately, 2011, 2012. The that road is far less stable than Town Hill at Gallison. So you end up doing it more often. Yeah. Well, it's the underpinning. And basically, when you're bullmag it, you're going to gain some life on the road because that adds material to the underneath. So even though it was 10 years or so, that's still a pretty good stretch of time for shim and overlay. And now that we're bullmagging it and doing it better than we have in the past, no last longer. So anyway, any more information on that before we move to the next one? No. Okay. Well, we're a little early, aren't we? 648. And Bonnie's not here yet. Bonnie's not here. Bonnie is coming. Do you want me to fit in? What's that? Oh, I was going to suggest you maybe move to the next item. I'm not prepared to talk about the ARPA. I'm here actually to listen to Bonnie talk about ARPA funding. So you don't want to hear anything that I have to say in that regard. Oh, I just want to fit in the 911 street address corrections because that's a five-minute item. Yeah, that's what I was suggesting. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So Bruce, can you fill us in on the street address corrections? So they're pretty much self-explanatory. The point of giving the list is that this list has been hanging around other than the two Cherry Tree Hill ones. This list has been hanging around since before me. So the numbers all predate 2006. And every one of them has a fix available, but every one of them has landowners that don't want the fix. And our general mode here has been to do them when landowners are on board. Oh, so this is for showing them is just so that you guys are aware that these are out there. They need to be fixed. Whether you want me to do them now and take off a large number of landowners. The wheel of road one is going to have to happen no matter how unhappy people are because of the subdivision that's employed. Why are they unhappy? I don't I don't understand they don't want to change the numbers that we gave them originally. They were upset enough to have to take the numbers. The numbers now were willing to change them on them. They're not so willing. I'm sorry. Can we just review what the problem is and what the fix is? I'm not sure. So we can start with something like wheel of road. That's a from Gallison Hill. The first stretch is used to be sugar house, but we now call it wheeler. And then the second stretch has been developed over the last 30 years. A short stretch is public. And that is where Kim Swayze and John Sampson stuff is in there's another house there. The further end is private. It's the public road goes off to the south and hooks up badly with Codling Road, but it's now a legal trail. The private road is a subdivision that has four houses on cul-de-sac. And the numbers that were given to the cul-de-sac bear no relation to what they ought to be. And they've been there for 20 plus years now. What authority do we have over the addresses on a private road? Complete authority. Okay. Fine. You gave them in the first place and you can change it. I would think for emergency services, they'd like to have the correct number. Most of these are arguably hard to miss. Okay. No matter what number you gave them. Okay. Northwood Apartments, if you tell the fire department it's in building B, they're going to find it. Yeah. If you tell them it's at 20 Southwood, they'll say, what the heck is Southwood? Where's 20? Yeah. So there is some logic to fighting back a little bit. Bruce, why would people be upset at Northwood? Aren't those mostly just apartments, rental apartments, people come and go all the time? They don't come and go all that much. But yeah, Northwood is not so much the, we haven't gotten down to the tenant level with Northwood. Oh, we're dealing with Allen? Yeah. And he's resistant? Yeah. That'd be a kind of way of phrasing it. Well, I don't know how much purchase he has with the town considering other issues we have with him. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just telling you how the boards over the years have handled these. If you want to change the way they're handled, we can do it. I'm for fixing it myself, but... So are there any of these on this list, Bruce, that would cause real difficulties for emergency services in accurately finding a place? No, because they're all known addresses. I mean, as I said, these have all been in place for over 20 years. Oh. So it's not that emergency services is asking me for this. This is something we know is wrong. Right. 911 board knows it's wrong. And we ought to fix it at 10 points. On Guyette Road, 1065 can be an even number. So that's how people might be looking on the wrong side of the road. So again, this is one of those where you sit there and go, what the heck? How'd you get it on the wrong side of the road? But the logic is they numbered Guyette to Chickering correctly. And then beyond Chickering, north of Chickering, Port Factory, they numbered it as if you were coming up from Route 14 on Factory. So they put the even numbers on the other side. Well, that sounds to me like might want to do a wholesale re-numbering. Oh, it'd just be those three. No, I mean, so that it all comes up in the same direction. So we should say for the record that the point of E91 addresses is to make distances traveled along the road correspond to an address. So 1065 would be 1.065 miles from the beginning of the numbering on that particular road. Right. But the trick is you number select board made choices back in 96. They chose to come off Route 14, both at Hammett Hill and at Factory. So they needed to meet somewhere, but normally you would meet at the end of a road, not in the middle of a road. Right. But the number clearly is coming from the Hammett Hill-Snow Hill intersection because it's still going up. It's not coming up from Factory. It'd be in the 400s if it was coming up from Factory. Okay. It's clearly coming from Hammett Hill. Oh, for the entire length of data. Right. Okay. So it needs to be planned. But again, these have been in place from the beginning. These actually go back to 96. Okay. We can do this with any of them. Carter Barn, there's no new building there. It hasn't been a new building in 30 years, but there's four distinct places with addresses on that driveway. Right. You know, Brasier Road, the development road that became Sugar House was always supposed to be a through road. And so you've got numbers coming from both sides, rather than all the ones that ended up being developed could have been numbered either from Brasier or from Bliss because there's only two from Brasier and only one from Bliss. They're all wrong. But again, Sugar House has two houses. Nobody would mistake which one is first, which one's second. Huh. So yeah, it's one of those that, as I said, this has been, this was brought to the select board before me, brought to the select board during me. And now we've gotten rid of some of them when we get landowners happy to do it. But there's still 10 or more sitting out there. I'm for Fixium, but I don't know how everyone else feels. And the intent, the intent, as I understand it, of the 911 address change was to give clear, primarily give clear signals to E, emergency services, 911. And if we don't have ambiguity here that would confuse emergency services, I'm not sure that it's important to push changes through. But I mean, as we get newer people on the EMT squads or fire squads, I mean, they might not be as familiar with, you know, the location of, they may not be as familiar with what has existed before or the pattern. But that's my only concern that while everybody knows where these are, and you know, you've got someone who's driving a truck who doesn't, that might be a problem. It seems foolish to leave the system in place if it's inaccurate. That's all I can say. It was made, we try to make it accurate for a reason. We need to make it accurate. As we move forward, this is Judith, or whoever said that, I think it was Judith, that if there's new people on the truck and they're going by accurate methods, they're going to be screwed. Or somebody will we? I would think people would even have problems getting their head. I was going to say, I would think that people could have some problems getting delivery from UPS and FedEx as well. Because if they did, then they would probably be willing to have the number changed. And I'm hearing that they are willing to have the number changed. I mean, if we were in a dense urban area, then I can see, okay, you might get confused about the numbers. But if you're on a road with two houses on it, and the number doesn't correspond exactly to 10 hundreds of a mile from the beginning of the road, even a new driver is going to find the place if he or she can find the road. But I mean, I appreciate that. But and I also get that the police response time is a lot slower than we might want it to be just because they're so far away. But if someone is going to a particular address because of the domestic assault going on, and there aren't any outward, there's not a fire coming out of the windows, and there aren't any other outward manifestations of what's happening indoors, you would want the police department to know exactly the correct address and not have to, well, I hear Mr. Smith sold it to, you know, Jane, whomever. And this is really, you know, if someone is coming from the barracks in middle sex, they're not going to know. I mean, they may not know. And I guess I'm with you, Seth, that we should make it accurate so that if tragedy occurs, or if someone is desperate and is in need of services, yeah, they're not going to the wrong address. I agree. I agree 100%. Okay, so it's just about seven in Bonnie's here. So we need to get on with this thing. We've thrashed around a lot. I think there's a couple of us on the select board like to fix this. Is anybody else I hear from Judith? I'm on complete agreement that we should fix it. Anybody else think so? So, Seth, before we go too far on this, don't think that it isn't getting fixed. It's just not getting fixed instantly. As I said, this list used to be about 20. Now it's down to about 10. So over time it's happening. It's just essentially we just keep passing the list along. Is there any low hanging fruit on that list? Well, wheeler roads low hanging because it has to happen. Donner road, you'll hear more about as time goes on this year, and that will have to happen. So those two are going to come off. The world altogether now will also happen when they actually do the part of the project that needs to happen before we can do the re-numbering. So that's three. So why don't we just pack away at the list. And like John said, the low hanging fruit, which is of course the best way to do it, the easiest people first at what you've probably already done. But I would say that we keep pecking away at it a little more aggressively. So that's my thought. I agree. Yep. Makes sense. So we could entertain a motion and see what happened. So we just get moved on here because Bonnie's patiently waiting. You don't really need a motion. If by consensus you want to push it harder, just say so. Okay. I say you push it harder. Who else says that? I don't really know what it means either. You're saying to have the three low hanging fruit addresses be dealt with imminently and then the rest will just kind of punt for a while. Is that what you're saying? I'm not for the gentle punting. I'm for a little more aggressive punting. Okay. But it should be noted that I brought these here so you would know about them because it's been a while since we talked about them. We will get rid of a couple this year. But where goes from there? I'm content with gradual incremental changes. Yeah. I'm fine with that. What do you think, John? I think that, like I said, let's go for the low hanging fruit. That's probably the gradual way of doing it. I do think that we could do something over at Northwood too and it wouldn't really be a big issue except for Allen Goldman. Okay. It's actually completely in that particular one is completely in place. There's a format we set up. It's already been approved by 9-1-1, but Allen has to agree to do certain physical changes to the buildings, put numbers up, put numbers on the apartments, that kind of stuff. Wouldn't that be smart to do that? Of course it would. Of course it would. How about the consensus be that we encourage or whatever the term is, Northwood apartments, Wheeler Road, Donner Road, and then all together now to make those changes. I'll second that. I don't know what that means. That they need to. So the numbering takes, so the numbering takes place by the lander? No, by me actually, by the 9-1-1 coordinator. We would change things, send it on to the 9-1-1 board, they either accept them or challenge us on, and then the landowner would just have to accept it. But they put the numbers on. What was that? The landowners put the numbers on. Right. This town has never funded that particular part of life. Other towns have done that. So what about if we ask the town administrator to move forward with that the next month? So the challenge here isn't me doing stuff, it's you guys being prepared for the fallout if it comes. I mean, we can go ahead and do it. We won't make people happy. We did the ones that made people happy. Also that you identified are going to happen anyway in the course of other events, what we've been told to do, except for the Northwood apartments. So I would be okay with moving forward with Northwood apartments and starting the process for renumbering those and then letting those other three play out as they play out and get changed. I can support that. Yeah. Sure. That's fine. Sounds good. If there's fallout, there's fallout. Yeah. Is that a consensus or are we going to do a motion? It's consensus. Okay. I think we're good. Okay. You're good on that, Bruce? Okay. Perfect. The next item went back up to D. Since we did F, it took a little longer than we thought. That's okay. D is discussion on ARPA focused on standard allowance. And we have Bonnie Wanger from CVRPC to talk to us about it. Great. Thank you for having me this evening. I'm a man. Thank you for coming in. I'm imagining you guys have spent a little time now and again talking about ARPA. What Bruce asked me to talk about tonight was a particular item about revenue replacement because the ARPA final rule allowed for some interesting things, but you have to make a decision by April 30th as to whether you're going to take advantage of an opportunity in the final rule. And so backing up a little bit, ARPA, the American Rescue Plan Act, basically provided funding to municipalities and state government to help recover from the effects of COVID. And what it did was fund about 66 different kinds of things that you could do with the money the federal government has provided you. The final rule issued by the U.S. Treasury said if you want to do revenue replacement, which is one of the items, you have two choices. And some people have been calling this lost revenue. Basically, you can either calculate how much revenue you lost due to COVID. And there are particular things you need to do. Or if you're getting less than $10 million in federal funds, you can simply choose to take something called a standard allocation without calculating. And you can simply declare that all of your funds are lost revenue. You can do a hybrid in there, but really why would you if you could take it all? You could choose to use the other 65 categories and do standard allocation. But the lost revenue, the revenue replacement item, is solely for the provision of government services. And so that is things like maintenance of infrastructure, something called pay-go spending, which is you are paying it out of your town budget, you're not taking out a loan for it. It's things like cybersecurity, health services, almost anything you spend normally in your town budget counts as provision of government services. The one thing you need to think about is that you can't, if you choose this method, you can't use the ARPA money to reduce your tax rate. So you can't say, great, our ARPA money will fund our FY22 budget items and we don't have to tax our citizens. You still need to tax them like you normally plan to do. But what you would essentially do is designate, you would choose the item provision of government services and you would pay for things like wages and benefits with your ARPA money for the provision of government services this year. And then you would repurpose the tax dollars your citizens gave you and spend it on other items. I'm trying to think about a good way to describe this. You've got, you're taxing your citizens here and you get your ARPA money here. You basically save my ARPA monies spending for some of this, which frees up these dollars and I'm going to spend them on something else. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's pretty clear. Okay, great. So if you use the, if you use revenue replacement for the provision of government services, we're still going to encourage you to think long term. This is still money you wouldn't normally have gotten and it's a great thing to invest in your long term goals, whatever they may be. But going back to those, that standard allocation, it offers you a lot of flexibility because you can do that, but you must make the decision by April 30th and it is irrevocable. Once you make it, you don't get to go backwards. Yep. And you should think a little bit about your financial system structure and policies. So ARPA monies can't be used to fund your reserve fund. So that money that you free up, you can't put in a reserve fund and if you have a policy and you're essentially creating a budget surplus by using the ARPA money instead of the tax dollars. If you have a policy in place that says anytime we have a surplus that goes to our reserve fund, you either need to not select that item or you need to make a policy change so that you're not doing something that ARPA doesn't allow you to do. So it cannot go on a capital reserve. It cannot go in a reserve fund, which does not mean that you can't spend it on infrastructure or capital items. You can spend your municipal dollars that way, but you can't put those municipal dollars in the reserve fund. Okay. Okay. So that's something to be careful of. And I will tell you that VLCT has graciously hired a municipal accountant because the answer isn't the same in every municipality. You all have different financial systems and you all have different policies. And Sarah Macy is there to help you walk through some of this and provide you some guidance if you choose to do this method. The other thing you want to think about if you go on that method is how much other federal money you get. So do you guys know what a single audit is? You get your regular audit, but if you spend more than $750,000 in federal funds in a fiscal year, you have to get a special audit on the generally your program that spends the most money. So when you start thinking about the standard allocation, you might want to think a little bit about whether you take it all the first year or spread it out over three years, depending on the other federal money you get. And the U.S. Treasury is supposed to release some additional guidance on this, hopefully before April 30th, which might help clarify that, but it's really more of a caution. You can pay for a single audit. Just think about it. But essentially you're creating a budget surplus. The one thing that we're telling towns about when you create that budget surplus, because you're creating it from your municipal tax dollars, you can use those tax dollars to match other federal grants. So you're not using the ARPA allocation. You can't use the ARPA funds for match. But when you free up your tax dollars, those tax dollars can then be used as match for any kind of federal grant you have. So there's an advantage there. And my last recommendation is if you choose to go that route, look at last year's budget for what you, how did you use your tax dollars to provide government services? What did you spend your tax dollars on? Those are the kinds of things you want to spend the ARPA money on. Generally the easiest things to do is wages and benefits for your employees. Start with the things you spend money on every year. They're a little safer, a little more audit proof. Things like one-time consultants. You're not doing that every year for that project. So maybe you want to save those to the very end and not spend your ARPA, your freed up funds. I'm sorry. Your freed up funds. No, I'm sorry. See, even I get confused. The ARPA funds, when you elect provision of government services, you still need to spend them on government services. So start with the easy things like wages and benefits and the things you spend for government services every year. Try to avoid the one-time expenses that might have been in last year's budget or the budget before. Both VLCT and regional planning commissions. Right now it looks like this is a great options for towns. The U.S. Treasury created it because they don't want to answer questions from towns across the nation who got a little bit of ARPA money and don't want to mess up how they spend it. But it seems like right now that's the best option for towns. And since it's expiring that you have to make the decision by the 30th of April for trying to walk from town to town and tell you about that option in case you didn't know. And to answer any questions you might have that we can answer. And the amount is up to $10 million. But it's really up to the amount you get in ARPA funds. In Vermont, only the city of Burlington can't take advantage of this provision. Everybody else gets 10 million, gets less than 10 million in ARPA funds. So the only decision we have to make by the 30th is whether to take the standard allocation. And that seems like a no-brainer to me, but I don't know what does everyone else think. I was going to ask, would there be a reason not to do that? I think that the only reason anyone's cautious is because Treasury said they're going to come out with a little more guidance. And right now it absolutely seems like the no-brainer. Right. And maybe you decide you want to make that final decision with a motion closer to April 30th. So let's, let me try to understand what we can do with the money that we raise through taxes that would be freed up by filling our copies with ARPA funding for the standard allocation. Bonnie, you said that we could not use that extra money to put it into our capital reserve, although we could spend it on projects that are funded by the capital reserve. Is there anything else that we can legally do with our tax money that we would not be able to do with this tax money that's freed up by adding the ARPA funding? The advice is don't spend it on things that ARPA says you can't spend it on, so that you have a clear line. Don't spend it on pensions, on rainy day funds, financial reserves, and outstanding debt. Although in my most recent conversation with Katie, she, Katie Buckley at VLCT, she did tell me that if you do your finances right you might be able to pay down debt with your money, but you really want to talk to Sarah and make sure, Sarah and VLCT, and make sure that you have all the right policies in place and all the right financial procedures that you need to have in place before you try to pay down any debt. For example, one thing that we've talked about using the money for is to give it to CV Fiber to help them provide fast internet to our residents. Is that okay? Let me ask Katie that question directly. The only reason I'm hesitating is because I thought there was something in statute that said municipalities can't give their tax dollars. That's right. In the communication, the CUD legislation. So in that case, if you want to give them money, you might want to give it to them under a regular ARPA category and would this be the hybrid thing that you were talking about? Yes, this would be the hybrid allocation. But I'm going to take this question back to VLCT specifically. Grace, as usually our person, Grace has left. And so I don't have as much depth. I just am getting the standard allocation thing. So that was not a question I've heard previously. So I'll verify it with Katie and get back to you. But I believe then you'd want to use the hybrid model. Thank you. And that's not the standard allocation? In the hybrid model, you would take a portion of your funding under the standard allocation and then you would use the broadband item to give money to CV Fiber. Okay. So we have to make it from your ARPA money. So we have to make that decision about the hybrid model by April 30th? Yeah. If you're going to do anything with the standard allocation, you have to decide by April 30th. Okay. So I got a question for you. So it sounds like if you take the standard allocation, you have three years to spend that money on regular expenses for wages, etc., etc. Government services. Government services. Three years. So that's for us $250,000 a year. Not a big deal. And that would be easily done. And then the big challenge is what do you do with your regular money that you've taken in with taxes? Right. So then... And now... Sorry, go ahead. So what you're saying is we can't take that extra $250,000 in regular tax revenue and put that in our capital reserve. We cannot do that. My understanding is you cannot. Oh. Because you're not as audit-proof as you otherwise would have been. That's a pretty good question. We can use it on capital projects, though. Yes. We can use it... We can use it on capital projects. And then whatever you normally would have put into your capital reserve, create an arms-length transaction is the advice. And how many years do we have to spend the money on capital projects? Sorry. And in 2006. In 2020, maybe? Yeah. Three years. Have to encumber the money by 2024. Signed contracts, things like that. But then they can spend... The construction project can actually happen later as long as you have the signed contract. So we could do a construction project with our extra tax revenue. That correct? Yes. Okay. If you were to use it for wages and benefits, would it have to be something exactly that was the wages and benefits of your previous years? You could actually... I mean, if you wanted to introduce a new benefit, for instance, could you do that? Or would it have to be exactly what was allocated before? It would be safer to stay with exactly what was allocated before. But again, you could take other tax dollars and institute the new benefits. This is all of the features and policies came. What you need to do is make the decision to do the standard allowance. Right. After that, the guidance is going to come rolling in as time goes on. Right now you're at this crunch point where the guidance isn't here, but your option is. And the presumption is, as we were saying earlier, the guidance is going to be really flexible because the Department of Treasury does not want to deal with this. They don't want to answer this one. Not from us and... Yeah. Yeah. I did Jilly and other things. Yeah. So we're going to figure this out, but we're not figured out tonight. Yeah. But the question of whether to do the allocation, you know, either tonight or on the 18th and then should be it. So the only question I have, I think the standard allocation is good for us, but on Carl's question about the CV Fiber, I think we have to answer that before we move ahead. Is that correct? I'm going to say no, Seth, because I think there isn't enough clarity and there isn't going to be enough clarity in time. Okay. That question never went away. We asked it back in August. Right. And the rules have not changed as to how that works. John. Plus, I'm not sure this has changed. If we give this money to CV Fiber and they don't spend it in an appropriate manner or in an appropriate amount of time, the town's responsible for paying that money back. We get a claw back. And that was our perception before that the strings would still reach to CV Fiber and we would be liable for their conduct with the money. That's basically what we were thinking before. So I'm not sure where this discussion is going. Are you suggesting, Bruce, that it would be difficult for us to use this money to give to CV Fiber? That, yes. Do you think we should know the RFI funding? Not that it would be difficult. It's that we don't know that it's safe. And that was the same thing we recognized right off the bat. And those questions have still not been answered. Nine months later. Well, Bonnie's going to VLCT. It will be asking a variant of that question. So let's see what. But I don't think VLCT has ever lost that question. Bonnie can ask it again, but I don't think Katie has ever stopped asking that exact question. So I'm still saying you've got a certain amount of time and I don't think this is going to be clear enough. That may well be true. Well, we don't have to make a decision tonight. No, you do not. And I guess I would try to understand. Let's say we have an allocation of $100,000 out of this that we want to give to CV Fiber. We don't know before the time we need to make our decision, either the 18th or we have a special meeting sometime later in the month. What the rules are and whether we can safely give it to CV Fiber. But Bonnie, if we go with a hybrid model and carve out $100,000 from the standard allocation, then I assume that we could still use, if we so choose that $100,000 for some other safe, ARFA approved categories, is that correct? I think that you can, yes. And the question I was going to ask Katie was just to clarify, but I guess we know you can't use your other municipal funds for broadband. Yeah. So the carve-out, we don't have to be specific in the carve-out. I thought that if you're doing the hybrid and you're allocating or parsing out $100,000 or whatever the amount is, you have to identify which of the categories, the ARFA categories, this fits under. And if we're looking, if we wanted to fit under the broadband category, but we later find out, oh, we can't do that or we're going to be on the hook, are we going to lose $100,000? Right. That's a good question point. What do you think about that, Bonnie? I think I'm going to check with Katie around the educated guess. I thought all you had to do by 4.30 based on our meeting was decide how much money you wanted to take for the standard allocation. I'm now going to go back and check and make sure you don't have to submit a plan. Because the one thing we can't see, we can't get into the portal to look at what you see in the portal because we're not a municipality. So we all have to find a nice municipality to walk through the portal with us, which is what Katie's doing with a particular town she has. So I'm walking through the portal with more town tomorrow morning. So it sounds like we can make a decision. April 18th, we'll have a little more information. And that's where we're at. I mean, I think we all say we want to take the standard allocation, obviously, but we just got those questions about the allocation of the hybrid model. Right. So I'm for moving on doing more discussion on this April 18th. We'll have a little more information and hopefully we can make a decision then. You do have to make a decision then. Yeah, no, I'm fine without making that decision. I just think that we have a couple of questions about the hybrid model. Could we ask Bonnie to come back on April 18th or to provide us with the information that she has before then? It'd be nice if she came back on the 18th. That's how I'm feeling. What about you, Bonnie? Apologize and tell you that I'm in the more town select board that night, although I can figure out timing and try and meet with you both. That's a nice part of hybrid meetings. And Bruce, I will copy you when I ask Katie the questions. Great. Thank you, Bonnie. That would be wonderful if you could be here, because your answers might stimulate more questions from us. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it'd be great if you could, if not, pass on the information. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you for, thank you, Bonnie, for telling us what's going on. And hopefully we'll see you again soon. Certainly. And could I do just one brief on ARPA thing? Could I introduce you to one of our new staff members who's also participating? Yes. Your cameras just flashed on. This is Brian Voight. He's our new natural resources planner. So you would talk with him about stormwater agriculture. You can talk with him about floodplains, mining minerals, what else is natural resources? Water quality. Water. Thank you, Brian. I said stormwater should be general water quality. Yep. So I just wanted to introduce him tonight. He's shadowing some meetings to get to know more municipalities. He lives in Waitsfield and he's been working at UVM, primarily in GIS for the past, what, 10 years, Brian? A little bit longer than that. Longer than that. So we just wanted to show you our new faces. Nice. So that you could meet us. You'll be seeing them along the way in meetings and things like that as we chat. Okay. Well, look forward to that, Brian. Nice to meet you. Yep. Feel free to reach out anytime. Okay. Well, I'm sure we have questions as we move forward. A lot of things to talk about. Well, I will do my best to answer them as long as they're not related to ARPA. Yeah. Well, I think we'll be all right with ARPA. We'll get it cleared up. But anyway, thanks for tuning in. Yep. Thanks. Thank you guys. Thank you. Bye. All right. So ARPA is done. The next thing we have is E, consideration of local emergency management plan. What do we need to know here, Bruce? We have to make a new one? I hope not. Well, it's the new one, but only in the sense that there's a slightly new template. So you had to throw everything over into that template. But basically, it's the exact same stuff. The only changes in here that you would notice is that we now have an ATV listed. We never had one of those before. Now that we know we have one, we list it. Whew. Thank God. There's a few phone numbers that were updated this time. And we already did what Carl had us do last year, get everything into 10-digit numbers. But really, there's nothing. All the vulnerable population centers are the same as last year. So all good. Nothing very exciting. And more importantly, none of the procedures change. So it's lockstep to what we did last year. Yeah. And what do you need from us? Well, you have to sign the thing. Me personally? Other than that, we adopt the plan. Okay. So we need a motion. We need a motion to adopt the plan and I personally have to sign it? Yeah. Remember, there's a second document that you and I both signed. Yeah. You sign it as the EMD and basically the plug board chair. And I sign it because I've taken the coursework. Yep. And then can you wait till Wednesday for that? Oh, yeah. We have the rest of the month. Oh, good. Yeah. I'll be home tomorrow night or Wednesday morning at 1 o'clock or something. Whenever you're next in, we can get it signed. Oh, very nice. Yeah. Okay. So we need a motion to adopt the plan, I believe. So moved. And authorized chair Garger to sign it. So that's Amy's motion. Yeah, you just put words in her mouth basically, John. Yeah, thanks, John. That's not what I meant, but okay. But John, that wasn't a second? Yes, that was a second. Oh, that's my thought. Okay. So any further discussion on the local emergency management plan? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. The ayes appear to have it, they do have it. So let's see. The next item is G since we already did F. And that item is discussion on town management light of COVID-19. What do we have to discuss on this item? There's nothing specific. This is just, you've now put it in a resolution that you're going to do this every meeting. So here you go. We long time ago put it in a resolution and we're going to do it every meeting. Are things working out with the no mask requirement in the town office? There was no pushback before and there's no pushback now. It seems to be going just fine. And there was so little chatter. But I'm, Rosie might have something to say. I don't know. I haven't noticed anything. Do you have anything to say, Rosie? No, I'm fine. I guess, I guess the only comment that I will make is that my coworker is very anxious that the acrylic counter piece stay where it is for now. So that people aren't literally spitting in our face when we stand at the counter. But that's got nothing to do with masking. So it's still up. Okay. Well, I don't believe that's going anywhere. Either. Okay. Well, I don't mind moving to the next item if no one has much to say. I'll just throw up there the last number that I checked at the CDC website were for the end of last week. And if you look at the old, what would you call it? The old standards that they have, the old metric that they have, which is community transmission, as opposed to their new community levels, which factors in the availability possible that the community transmission is two and a half times the threshold for high in Washington County. So high would be 100 cases per 100,000 in the previous seven days. And we had 260. So just throw that out there for reference what's going on. But on the other hand, when I've been checking the last week or so, there have been most of the days or all of the days we've had nobody in the ICU in the whole state. Okay. And the rolling average has come down again. So hopefully we're going in the right direction again for Washington County. We were a real outlier in the states for the numbers ending last Thursday. Interesting. Okay. So if we're all done with the town management line of COVID-19, I'd like to move to age. Age is appointments. The first one is Conservation Fund Advisory Committee. And that's Nora Dwayne. Are we going to go through these all together and just make one motion, or do we make a motion for each one? So for what you want to do it. I'm going to get over controversial. So the next one is by the committee. She's on the committee. She's on the committee. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And all the appointments essentially. Okay. And they've all been contacted and they're willing to do it. I mean, Nora just missed the deadline for the last meeting. You know what Tim's issue was. And Tom had hoped to maybe have an alternate in mind before he got appointed, but haven't pulled that off yet. I think we can make a motion to approve all three, personally. So moved. Okay. That was John. And we have a second by Judith. And all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. The ayes appear to have it. They do have it. Next item is I it's the warrants. And there's three people in the office. They could probably sign those warrants. Correct. The third sign. Oh, perfect. It's a free routine. Yeah. I can see mostly vehicle maintenance and power bills and maybe fuel. Yeah. Involved interest. Yeah. Born interested. That's a good size one. What's happening? That's the land record system. Oh, okay. Have a new. I make a motion that we did. We don't have any motions. That's going to sign it. Right. Are you all you guys are. I'm not saying because I'm not there. Oh, that's right. But they have three people to sign them. Amy, Judith and Carl. So that should be fine. You already signed it. Yes. Okay. So everyone's satisfied with the warrants. And I'll go to Jay, which is other business. And my recollection recollection is we don't have other business. That correct. Nothing very exciting. Well, I don't have your select board memo in front of me. So the, the only new thing is there's an active 50 notice that came in today. It's deals with Brian Phillips transferring the land from the business property to his home property. We've already approved that at our level. So I can't imagine the select board or planning commission will have much to add for the active 50 permit. But you have the right if you so desire. Did he have an active 50 permit before? Yes. For the business, yeah. He got it back in 2006. I think somewhere around there. Yeah. Okay. All right. Does anybody have any comment about that? No. No. Okay. So that takes care of Jay, I believe. Just remember that you have a fire department meeting next Thursday, the 14th. Oh boy. I'm not going to be here then. I don't even know if I can zoom in actually. Same here. So just out of curiosity Seth, are you going to be here on the 18th? Yes. Okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't miss that meeting for anything. Just keep checking because the last thing I want is for that to go off with not enough board members to make it worth anybody's watch. No. I'll definitely be here on the 18th. I'm just gone to a conference on 12th, 13th, 14th. Okay. I will not be here. So anyway, so the fire department meeting is the 14th, you said? Yes. Yeah. I won't be here unless I get home early, but I doubt I will. Okay. I think we're done with all that. I think the last thing is personnel matters, potential executive session. It better be executive session, I believe. Is that? I don't have to go into executive assessment to discuss the personnel matter. Okay. Okay. So we need... I can second it if you want. Yeah, you can second it. Well, I'm getting no signal from somebody. East Montpellier, it says no signal. Yeah, I think that's Carl, no. Well, I can see you guys. Okay. Okay. So we have a second to go into executive session. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. We have the ayes. So Orca needs to go away, and Rosie... Recording stopped. Yes. Yes. Okay. So we're out of executive session, and we're authorizing the town administrator to contact a applicant for the treasurer position. For the treasurer position. We're authorizing the town administrator to make offers of employment to two candidates. One for the town administrator position, and one for the town treasurer position. Correct. Okay, sounds good. By consensus of the board. I think that's it. Is the meeting over, you mean? Not yet. You should adjourn it, John. You should totally do that. It could be over if someone made a motion. I make a motion we adjourn. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you.